Fighting for our children: Meet the new age feminists

Published: 26 May 2011

FEMINISM is back in vogue again. And leading the charge is small, dark-haired twenty-something, Laurie Penny.

When I met Penny at the University College London occupation last autumn she was fiery and articulate and gung-ho against nasty “patriarchal” capitalism. When she said she wanted to make the Tories and New Labourites “unelectable”, she sounded mean – and the applause rolled in. 

Nothing much has happened since then to her enemies.

She was at it again on Tuesday, launching her latest tirade, Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (Zero Books, £9.99p).

She is one of those new feminists who see – rightly in the opinion of this unreconstructed curmudgeon – that women’s bodies are being “exploited” by capitalism determined to “commodify” them just in order to make the last nickel of profit. I can see that. Any economic system needs to create enough “surplus wealth” to satisfy shareholders with enough left over for reinvestment. 

For decades, commodification has plundered popular music, fashion and women.

But fears that children are being sexualised in the pursuit of profit are met with cries that more sex education is required.

Oddly, Penny knocks this, yet in a moment of sudden candour at Bookmarks bookshop in Bloomsbury, she said she was in favour of “mandatory” sex education at five. 

She seemed to be squaring the circle.